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Arcades are a dying childhood pastime, but emulators have kept the quarter eating, and allowance sucking games of our youth alive. Even better, the good people at TouchArcade spotted a free Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) available for free in the App Store.

The emulator ships with nine “less than stellar” ROMs including: Circus, Crash, Hard Hat, Fire One, Robot Bowl, Side Track, Spectar, Star Fire and Targ. Thankfully iMAME operates like its non-iOS emulator counterparts and allows users to play a nearly limitless amount of games granted they have a working ROM. The app loads ROMS using a third-party utility like iExplorer without jailbreaking.

“Yep, add a .zip rom to the Docs folder through PhoneView and it works perfect! Just tried Crime Fighters! “ — @mattlukens.

While this is an awesome emulator and appears to function rather well, Apple’s has a mixed history with emulators. A number of individual emulators litter the App Store, but as MacRumors points out Apple has been much more restrictive with open emulators like the DOS/Windows 3.0 emulator they removed.

Sarcasm aside, let's see. Can't add Siri to non 4s devices due to piracy. Can't run the original acidrain due to piracy. Can't even mention ********** due to piracy. And if you don't think anyone will bother you about the roms, why not put up a cydia repo hosting a bunch of them? Make sure you post the end result.

What's the word on the games that need add-ons, like SNK's Metal Slug? I think the NeoGeo BIOS needs to be downloaded into a different folder. I forget exactly how I set mine up...I haven't added any new ROMs in a few years.